Charles Simic Quotes

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

If you tie a man's hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder.

I killed one man to save 100,000.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

What we depend upon in a political leader is the fact that if necessary he will kill for us…. If he is not willing to shed blood we are afraid of him. He must protect us.

War is about killing on both sides until one side says I will do what you want me to do.

To Joseph Stalin: Stop sending people to kill me! We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send a very fast working one to Moscow and I certainly won't have to send another.

I know in war good people can feel obliged for good reasons to do things they would normally object to and recoil from.

The violence of our time is caused by obedience.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Let someone else get killed!

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

If you want to please me very much, you will fall down when I shoot you," -Oates The White Darkness

So?" Bob said. "Hat up, go kill her. Problem solved." "Bob," I said. "You can't just go around killing people." "I know. That's why you should do it." "No, no. I can't go around killing people, either.

For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules.

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

In the interests of economy they condemned hundreds of children to death and I call it murder.

Oh, no. It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people?" says Peeta. "It costs everything you are.

Do they deserve to die?" but "Do we deserve to kill them?

The choice I mean is to protect our own innocents from the seraphim, instead of slaughtering theirs." "There are no innocent seraphim, said the wolf." "That's what they say when they kill our children.

Is there anybody here who thinks that following the orders takes away the blame Is there anybody here who wouldn't mind a murder by another name?

You cannot force me to agree with you. You can force me to act as though I agree with you but then you'll have to watch your back. All the time.

'I could kill you like this,' Peter whispered. 'Just press and press until you're dead'.